“The Catholic League is protesting this art exhibit!” he crowed in a stage whisper.

“This is censorship!” he shrieked. Then, as we say in the news business, he buried the lead.

“Go ahead and bash us. The artist needs publicity.”

The subject of this conversation was not “Sensation,” the collection of framed feces and a sliced-up cow that has made Mayor Giuliani turn colors. And made the director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art positively giddy at the prospect of Manhattanites jamming bridges and tunnels to cross the East River.

The publicist wanted to get a little excrement flying over some insignificant little art show then playing in SoHo.

When you cut through all the dung about First Amendment rights and religious persecution nowswirling in Brooklyn, this is what so much of modern art has been reduced to:

Sensation. Not anything resembling art. Just cheap publicity stunts.

The myth of the starving artist is as dead as the poor bovine who found herself the main dish in a questionable piece destined for this exhibit. Today, those who claim to be artists and the galleries who show their work compete for audiences shrunken by cable TV and the Internet, and clamor for public dollars like pigs at a trough.

The result is that any pretense of artistic merit is beside the point. As the publicist taught me, the smart marketing strategy is to offend and insult as many people as possible.

It is but a short leap to the point where art is created with the express purpose of making people sick. So what if your work has the artistry of an airplane barf bag? The lines to see it are around the block!

If you harbor any doubts that shock value has supplanted artistic value in cultural institutions, just listen to Arnold Lehman, director the Brooklyn Museum.

After visiting the exhibit in London, Lehman told one interviewer, he noticed not the work, but the fact that the line of patrons “stretched all the way out to Picadilly.”

Yesterday, the museum offered to remove a potentially offensive painting: a Virgin Mary splattered with dung. It’s a start.

But there is something far more twisted about this exhibit than a dung-stained painting. It is the way various factions – on both sides of the canvas – are taking the show to the bank.

It seems everyone involved – the Catholic League, which initiated the protest, as well as the director of the museum and Hillary Clinton – will walk away from the show as colossal winners.

Meanwhile, we – taxpayers and art lovers – get swindled.

The museum wins. It has gathered more attention than it deserves, which was the entire point of this exercise.

The Catholic League wins, too. In its quest to prove that Christians are persecuted, the league has adopted the most pathetic aspects of victim culture. It was a stroke of luck that “Sensation” featured a canvas of the Virgin. Like the museum, garnering publicity is the organization’s primary mission.

Hillary Clinton, with her mealy-mouthed promise to “boycott” the exhibit – while supporting its existence – has insinuated herself in a conflict in which she hasn’t any standing. Hillary hasn’t paid a dime in taxes to New York City that I know about. Butt out.

Even if you don’t agree with Mayor Giuliani about “Sensation,” the mayor brings up a valid point. Those who cry “censorship” over his attempt to yank public funds are guilty of fudging the issue.

Show me the paragraph of the First Amendment that guarantees a right to government funding for art that makes you queasy and I’ll buy you a very nice dinner. No one wants to ban bad art. We just don’t want to pay for it.

Can you imagine the outcry if your tax money underwrote the publication of Hustler magazine?

The tragedy is that the Brooklyn Museum has proved itself quite capable of drawing river-phobic Manhattanites. A couple of years ago, it presented one of the finest collections of Impressionist paintings ever seen in one place. I overheard more than one Manhattanite exclaim: “Can you believe we’re in Brooklyn?”

But gathering great art is hard. Angering people is as easy as flinging dung.